The Rig
R29 Tech Adventures
About
The Rig is dedicated to discussing the technical happenings behind Refinery29.
The Refinery29 Product Team!
Photographed by Erin Yamagata
Mar 08 2013
Hackathon: The Wrap Up
Even after working a full week back in the office, I think most of us are still struggling to get off island time. We’re sitting at our desks day-dreaming of Mai Tai’s, white sand, that time we almost fell off a cliff driving the truck, and late-night beach adventures. The view of the Standard Hotel from our office’s conference room just isn’t the same as the sweeping overlook of St. Thomas and Elephant Bay from our pool-side table.
Though clearly being on a remote island has its benefits, the real prizes were the prototypes we managed to build. Our red-bull fueled benders of staying up until 4am coding felt like cramming for finals, and instead of one massive scantron test we had a demo day with our founders Philippe and Justin.
When Philippe said, “This feels like Christmas morning,” I think we all let out a sigh of relief and congratulated ourselves on a job well done. Here’s what we came up with:
- A first-of-its-kind, interactive hub that allows R29 readers to feel like they’re right there with our editors at big events like New York Fashion Week. It includes a real-time social feed and the ability to experience galleries, videos and articles inline right on the page.
- A new mobile-web solution, including a major rethink of how to deliver slideshows for the small screen.
- The first re-imagining of the R29 home page that considers social, time and local geolocation as factors in content delivery.
- Functionality that can make any image instantly shoppable, tagged with videos like make-up tutorials, or whatever fun use we can imagine in the future.
Now post-island we’re going to be refining these prototypes and pushing them live. But in the end we think these tangible creations are really just evidence of what really happened on Water Island: we learned how to be a cohesive team. Refinery29 has grown so fast over the past 6 months (still growing!) that there have been some growing pains on the product side. Now we’ve bonded as a team and learned how to fuse both UX and development to work in tandem to create awesome tools and products that our users will love.
Fourteen coworkers, one house, one island, and zero fights or controversies. That’s kind of incredible.
Aug 07 2012
Hackathon: The Day-to-day
Our plans for a hackathon in the US Virgin Islands were mostly met with the following reactions:
- You’re kidding, right? Can I get a job there? (Yes you can!)
- Are you working hard or hardly working?
Now that we are here we’ve fallen into a pretty great balance of the two extremes. Going into the hackathon we defined our teams, our overall goals, and created somewhat of a schedule for our work. Now that we’re here some of these have changed to allow more support for bigger projects, goals that align with our editorial vision but also our technological curiosity, and a schedule that feels natural and unforced.
We’ve split our 14 product members into the growth and click-through-rate teams. We also have commerce and innovation teams, but they’re going to focus on fleshing out our next big moves in social commerce rather than focusing on building a product during this week. Our growth team is redesigning some of our core products: responsive mobile site, slideshow design and implementation, and homepage design. The CRT team is divided into two tracks: one developing a fashion week hub, and another flexible image tagging for showcasing products within article elements. Our goals are to expand user discoverability, grow the tool kit our editors can utilize, and enhance the performance of our applications.
As for our schedule, it’s pretty much anything goes until 1pm when we all come together to program and design. Meetings happen by the pool deck, some program on the kitchen island, others on couches, and all day yesterday the CTR team took over an entire living room, covered the walls with paper and wire-framed the fashion week hub. It’s great not only having unlimited space to work and design, but also unlimited access to our best resources—each other. We work well into the night, then relax with some light swimming or nighttime beach romping. And, of course, plenty of rum. Come on, we’re in the Caribbean!
